I don't know when the first time I came to blues news was, but I know it was in the 90's. There are almost no gaming sites left from that era and the ones that are left aren't anything like they used to be back then. www.bluesnews.com has been my homepage for over 20 years. The entire landscape of the internet has changed since I first came here. The nostalgia kicks hard when I think about how things used to be back then. I am glad to support this site and I give you my sincere thanks for making this site such a welcome place to be for the last 25 years!

I don't know if you envision being here another 25 years, but I will be here for as long as the site exists!

Thank you!!

Wallshadows wrote on Mar 16, 2021, 15:40:
I'm pretty sure the amount of power these will require will finally dethrone the FX 9590. Shame they're not releasing them in the fall because they'd make excellent space heaters even under water.

I saw where the 11900k can spike at up to nearly 300w needed with a sustained of over 180w. It's rated at 125w which is completely ludicrous.
That plus the insane latency increases that make it perform WORSE than the 10th gen in many cases... yeah...

I don't know when exactly I started coming to BluesNews but it was before I initially registered here on the forums, which was already 20 years ago. I remember it being the old format. Since roughly 1998ish either BluesNews or HardOCP (no longer exists, RIP) was my homepage. Blues has been my homepage for the majority of that time. I've been wanting to donate somehow for YEARS so I was so happy when the patreon was opened up and supported you immediately. I can't think of ANY other personal website I used to visit in the 90's that is still around. It's a testament to the quality content provided by you and the members like Ant and the others.

I've contributed a few links myself but nothing super special. I'm just thrilled that after so many years you are still here when so many others have gone away.

eRe4s3r wrote on May 12, 2020, 02:34:
This is a joke surely?

Checking it.. wow, the game is actually still played.. by a lot

https://steamcharts.com/app/289070

It's more popular now than it was 4 years ago. I don't even understand! Civ V is still played a lot but assuming you liked the new hex grid and no more "stack of doom" mechanics it was one of the best in the entire series. That can't be said for VI so it baffles me!

I've been coming to this website since the 90's. It's literally the only website I still go to from back then. It's been my home page for over 20 years. Supporting this site (through PayPal for me) was a simple decision!

Blue, I hope you can keep this site going for another 25+ years!

I've heard the low frequency hum before and I've done my own research on it. I generally only hear it when there are no other real sounds for me to hear. I have heard it outside but usually I'm inside when I hear it and it's rather random as to when/where. The most plausible things I've read is that it's the blood pulsing through your body that normally you can't hear (far too low frequency at less than 2Hz for resting pulse) being attenuated for some reason, or something more mundane like geothermal activity.

The only "conspiracy theory" idea for it that I can kind of see possibly being it is infrasound communication for submarines. VLF is still very high frequency, the infrasound stuff is well below normal human hearing on the order of 1-5Hz. The US Navy has actually communicated this way but they tend to not use it because it's extremely slow to communicate anything useful and still has a limited range.

Creston wrote on Sep 29, 2019, 14:53:
Hey monitor gurus, question:

If you play a game on an ultra-wide monitor and it doesn't support the ultra-wide resolution, what happens? Do you just get black bars on both sides of the monitor? Does it stretch the image to fit? Is that a choice, or something that just happens?

Thanks in advance!

What happens when you play a game that doesn't support the ratio you are running at completely depends on several factors.

1. The monitor may have controls to stretch or shrink it to fit
2. The game may have those some controls (most don't)
3. Neither of the above and you get one of two things, either the game will automatically stretch to fill the screen and look like ass, or it will be centered in the middle of your screen with huge black bars.

Generally you get the first part of #3 if you don't have control over #1 or #2. However, most monitors these days have settings that are configured from your display drivers that tell it what to do in situations where the game doesn't support the resolution.

Which game(s) are you looking at that might have this issue? You can also visit https://www.wsgf.org/ and get info on monitors and games.

I've suffered from tinnitus for my entire adult life. Mine started with being at a shooting range and someone next to me starting firing a semi auto .45 handgun without making sure I had my ears covered. The gunfire sounds reflected off the metal roofing covering the standing area and just made it worse. I had loud ringing in my ears for days after that. That was when I was 15 or 16. Now, 25 years later, I still suffer an incessant high pitched ringing in my ears. It literally never goes away although I've learned to live with it.

Being in super quiet areas, the ringing can be so loud comparatively that I can't do anything else but focus on it. It doesn't affect my actual hearing much, if any, at all. Although I've lost a bit of high frequency hearing I think that's mostly just because of me knocking on my 40th year and not the tinnitus itself. It does force me to sleep with a white noise machine so that as I fall asleep my brain doesn't focus on the ringing.

I can generally ignore it but it's there every single waking hour of my life. I can definitely see it driving some people to thoughts of suicide. I've tried many methods of making it go away and nothing has ever worked. The best thing for me is to find something to focus my attention away from it. If I'm otherwise occupied, I don't really pay attention to it. Whether that's a movie, a good book, music, playing a game or literally anything else.

For all the hate that Comcast gets, I personally never had an issue until I was moving to somewhere where they did not offer service. They didn't try to keep me (not too hard anyway) but they were convinced I never turned in all their hardware. The only thing I had from them was a cable card. The person behind the counter just simply didn't understand that everything else was my own stuff. They did not understand that with a cable card I was simply using a tuner card in my PC to get TV. They were sure I'd kept my cable box and DVR. Neither of which I'd ever owned/rented/used/etc from them.

My internet was fine through them except when Comcast itself was down (there was a huuuge nation wide outage while I was using them). My TV service (through the cable card) was fine as well. No issues whatsoever once everything was setup.

However, my parents have Comcast as well and it's been a literal nightmare for them. They pay well over $200 a month and can't even get basic customer service that isn't shoddy as hell.

Good luck Blue!

p.s. I am now living in an area that pioneered residential gigabit internet and was the first in the entire world to offer residential 10 gigabit. I now get 90+ megabytes per second speeds from steam with no data caps and no BS. I adore it, I choose where I move based on if they support this ISP or not.

Looks like the OotB link tables got out of hand again.

Looks like the formatting on the links for OotB got screwy!

Losing a pet is so hard. I've had my share of lost pets and it never gets easier. Just always remember to think back on all the good times you had with them! I am so sorry you lost Gunnar.

Here's hoping the pooch gets better! My own dog has been acting strange lately and I can't afford to take him to the vet to see what's wrong, I'm hoping he pulls through and likewise I hope Gunnar gets better as well!

Flatline wrote on Mar 14, 2019, 11:32:

Darks wrote on Mar 14, 2019, 10:26:
Make it all instanced so that you can also see anyone who is in your group. Get rid of the unnecessary load screens and make the game more viable.

Have you ever seen a game eliminate load screens before? That'd require a pretty major architectural overhaul I'd imagine.

If a mod for oblivion and skyrim can do it, so can the original developers on a game like Anthem. It's obvious they do it for consoles, not because of any technical limitation given how many 100% open world games there are these days.

I am truly stunned at this news. While honestly, I won't play the original due to it's extremely outdated gameplay mechanics, this is amazing news.

I am still using a logitech MX518. Yes, THAT MX518... I bought one original nearly 15 years ago whenever they were new and about 5 years after that, I bought a second one off ebay once they were no longer being sold. I've been using the second one for about 5 or 6 years at this point. I really hope it lasts me long enough to survive until someone makes a replacement! I love the design and feel of the 518. nothing else has ever been made (that I could find) that fully replaces it.

Kindles will actually handle more than just .mobi. My first gen Kindle Touch will display PDF, plain text, .mobi, and .epub all fine. The suggestion of Calibre I 100% agree with. It is simply the best ebook library manager out there.

A Kindle Fire is a normal "tablet PC" optimized for Amazon. It is NOT an e-reader, although you can run the kindle app on it (just like any Android device) it uses a normal LCD screen just like a phone.

All the supported formats: Click Here

Over $3100 across 11 years for me. I installed steam when it first came out (2004?) but I didn't like it back then. I think I waited until the id Anthology came out to fully install/use it.

This number doesn't seem that bad until I realized that I've only bought maybe a dozen games in the past few years on steam. The majority of these purchases were probably done in a 6-8 year period. I'd wager that generally I bought a game a month for quite a while until about 2 years I stopped finding game that met my old geezer's idea of worth my money. (get off my lawn)

6 years after I created my account would have been 2012 which is fairly close to the last time I bought a lot of games. Ends up being something like $30-$40 a month. Yea... glad I don't do that anymore.

I love Steam as a platform but the software is in DIRE need of modernization. I don't mean updates and bandaids either. It needs a complete overhaul. My other huge gripe is all the SHIT software on Steam these days. I'm not saying Valve needs to review every single title under the sun, but something has to be done. Allowing all these early access games means 90% never finish and you're left with paying for games that are literally never "complete" in any sense of the word. I realize a lot of that is on us, the gamers, who buy all these shit games supporting these methods. However, there needs to be systems in place to prevent so many early access games from never being completed. They grab their EA money and never push out another update.

Sepharo wrote on May 4, 2016, 18:24:
Coming in 2020!

Nearly 2 years after you made this comment and it's confirmed that the likely date is in fact 2020!